Fiduciary Duty (9 page)

Chapter 4. Imagine a Stable Necrosis

Being unemployed is a tough thing in America. Our identities are tied in to our jobs. I’ve seen studies that equate a job loss with the death of a family member. In my case, it wasn’t that bad – I know now what it feels like to lose my wife and son, and the job loss, bad as it was, wasn’t even in the same ballpark. Still, it did feel like a very strong kick in the gut.

When I walked in the door, I smiled wanly. H walked over and gave me a hug. Then she showed me the new “M & O Job Loss” folder in the file cabinet. H was always organized that way. One of her favorite toys was a label-maker, and everything in the file cabinet was neatly labeled. The offer letter was already sitting in the file. I placed a few odds and ends, mostly phone numbers of various departments and printouts of correspondence in the file as well.

Then I unpacked my briefcase and pulled everything out. I had a made a point of not bringing back anything owned or paid for by M &O, not even my business cards. I wouldn’t need them in any case. After that, I was left with an empty feeling, as if there was something I was supposed to be doing and I wasn’t getting to it. I realized I was a bit too depressed to get anything done so I offered to take Jeremy out of H’s hair.

Jeremy and I went to Portage Lake, an eminently forgettable body of water northwest of Canton. It does have a small beach area. On weekends in the summer, when the water is warm, the beach fills up with families that have young children. The young children, in turn, contribute some additional warmth and coloration to the water at the beach end of the lake.

On a Monday afternoon the lake was, predictably, empty. I held Jeremy’s hand and we toddled forward on the muddy sand. This was only Jeremy’s second trip to the lake, and as much as he liked baths, he had gotten very nervous when he got his first glimpse of a large body of water. This time around he was still nervous, and he didn’t have the reassurance of seeing a bunch of other children barely older than he was splashing around happily. Holding hands, we cautiously approached the water and then spent about fifteen minutes in water up Jeremy’s belly. After a while, Jeremy forgot he was afraid and started playing. He was reassured by being with his Daddy.

Unfortunately, I had nobody to give me reassurance. I was, frankly, scared. I was scared I wouldn’t find a job, scared we’d run out of money, scared I’d failed myself, my wife and my son. But I smiled at Jeremy and didn’t let it show.

The next morning, I started work on my new resume. And then, at 9:15, I got a call from Barry O’Connor. He needed me in the office.

I drove over to the M & O building, arriving at 10:30. It was three and a half hours after I would normally have started my day. My desk was exactly as I had left it the day before, except that the chair had been swapped out for one that was clearly broken. I went looking for Barry O’Connor.

O’Connor was on the phone. He saw me, put his hand over the speaker, and said, “I’ll be with you in a few, hot shot.”

I gestured toward my cube, and then walked away.

I sat down in the broken chair. It tilted sideways and backwards. Precariously perched, I flipped on my laptop. Amazingly enough, my login ID and password were no longer valid. I was shocked that any branch of the company, much less the IT department could move that quickly.

I slid back from the laptop and the seat of the chair snapped off, landing me on the floor. Fortunately, I didn’t hurt anything, but I did feel embarrassed. Normally I would have said something to one of the secretaries, which would have resulted in a new chair, but it didn’t seem worth the hassle. I didn’t expect to be there much longer.

So I stood up, and leaned against my desk. Frankly, I was bored. I was also feeling anxious – I knew I should be working on my resume. My mind began wandering. A few people had nodded at me as I walked in but nobody had said anything. I wondered whether I was officially a pariah and if anybody would dare talk to me.

After ten or fifteen minutes, I leaned myself away from the desk and into a fully upright position. I then walked over to O’Connor’s desk. He wasn’t there.

I walked back to my desk. For the next half hour or so I cleaned scraps of food from the crevasses in my laptop’s keyboard with a piece of cardboard, a tack, and paper clip. Every so often I had to flip the laptop over and shake it to dislodge a particular stubborn particle. Then I pulled out my cell phone and checked my personal e-mail. Nothing had come in. I would have surfed the net but the battery on my cell phone tended to die quickly when I did that and I didn’t bring my charger. I hadn’t anticipated being at the office that long with nothing to do.

Eventually I went to cafeteria to get lunch. Nobody talked to me. A few people smiled at me and waved, but it clearly wasn’t healthy to be seen talking with someone who taken a severance package. I sat at a table by myself. After lunch, I went back to what had been my cube.

I tried stopping in to see O’Connor several times but he wasn’t there. By three in the afternoon, every scrap of food that had ever had contact with my laptop’s keyboard had been removed, cleaned, catalogued, and mentally filed for future reference.

At four, O’Connor walked to his desk. I followed. By the time I got there, he was on his phone. I waited. And waited. It sounded like O’Connor was talking with a hooker. About golf. Close to five, still on the phone, he started packing up his things. Then he hung up and started walking past me.

“Um, Barry,” I started.

“Oh yeah, hotshot,” he said, “I guess we’ll have to talk tomorrow. I expect you here no later than eight. Otherwise, you’ll be violating the terms of your severance agreement.”

“Talbot said I only had to come in if needed,” I replied.

“That’s right,” O’Connor said, “And I need you here. I’m your boss, and I’m your boss for twenty nine more days. Don’t you forget it, hotshot.”

Then he walked out.

The next morning, I arrived at eight. My broken chair no longer had a seat. Realizing I might have to come back for a whole month, I went to talk to Linda Trefontaine, the secretary of Stan Delacroix, the vice president in charge of the division I apparently was still in.

“Sorry,” she said, “I can’t get you network access and I can’t order you a chair. You’re not a regular employee anymore and you’re not a contractor either. Technically you’re only here to train people in what you do so you can be replaced and that means you don’t need equipment.”

I walked back to my desk. O’Connor was waiting for me.

“Where were you?” he asked, “Don’t start slacking off just because you’re a short timer or I’ll tell HR you aren’t cooperating.”

“I was talking to Linda Trefontaine,” I said, “And I’m not slacking off. I’m waiting for you to tell me what to do.”

“Why don’t you type up a description of everything you do and you do it? I’m going to have to take over for you, after all” O’Connor said.

“I’d like to,” I said, “But that’s what I what I was discussing with Linda. I can’t get network access. Without network access, I can’t pull the files I need or get you the information you want.”

O’Connor stopped in his tracks. “I’ll think of something for you, don’t you worry about that, hotshot. But in the meanwhile, wait here. I need to be able to find you.”

When O’Connor walked away, I thought about pulling out my personal laptop which I had brought from home. It was in my briefcase. I badly wanted to work on my resume. But it was obvious that if I had a working laptop, even one that couldn’t connect to the network, O’Connor would put me to work cataloguing all of my usual reports. While I would have done it for anyone else – as H kept telling me, my problem was that I was a workaholic, not that I was lazy – I had no intention of doing anything for O’Connor. I was quite confident that sooner or later he would actually have to do some of my work and I didn’t want to do anything that might inadvertently help him.

This left surfing the net on my phone. That day, I had brought my cell phone charger and I plugged the phone into the wall. Then I went looking for something that could pass for a chair. I came back ten minutes later with two boxes of printer paper. I probably could have taken a chair from one of the conference rooms, but something inside me perversely wanted to go the ghetto route. If I was being treated as a pariah I might as well go all the way.

Ten minutes later, while I was checking out a post on a new approach to the X.25 packet switching protocol, O’Connor walked over.

“What the heck do you think you’re doing, hotshot?” he asked.

“Reading up on packet switching,” I responded, pushing my cell phone into his line of sight.

For ten seconds, there was silence. O’Connor seethed. He thought he had caught me loafing, and he hadn’t. This was definitely information I had to keep abreast of for my job, or had been, in any case, before I got transferred into my temporary pricing assignment. But I saw it in his eyes, the way they lit up darkly the moment when he thought he found his loophole.

“I meant, why are you stealing from the company?” he asked, voice raised. That comment was sure to attract attention in the nearby cubes.

“Excuse me,” I said, “How am I stealing from the company?”

“You’ve got your own personal phone plugged into the socket. The company is paying for that electricity,” O’Connor all but yelled.

I looked at him like he was crazy. This made perfect sense, because he was crazy. “Everyone plugs their phone in, Barry. You do it yourself. You had your phone plugged in when you were speaking on it yesterday afternoon.”

“The fact that everyone else does it doesn’t mean I’ll allow it in my group. I can’t countenance how other managers manage their groups. But I won’t allow anyone who reports to me to steal from the company! And you are imagining things if you think I would ever do that myself,” he said.

I took a deep breath. “OK, Barry,” I said, “It won’t happen again.”

Barry harrumphed. Then, for good measure, he harrumphed again. With that, he turned around and walked away without even waiting to see whether I unplugged my phone. I noticed that Andrew Marley, one of Barry’s long-suffering direct reports, ripped his cell phone from the plug just before Barry walked by his cubicle. Barry’s attempts to inconvenience me were going to add weight to the cross the rest of his staff was already carrying.

The rest of the month passed very, very slowly. For the most part, I sat around and did nothing, ignored by everyone. Ironically, I spent most of my last week in regulatory training. During that month, however, I did manage to get a bit more information from Gordo. He seemed almost gleeful to tell me I wouldn’t be able to see the severance agreement until after I was no longer an employee, never-mind that that I had agreed to leave the company based on what I was told was in the agreement. He also happily implied that the terms of the agreement were subject to change since the agreement had not been signed.

Chapter 5. Severance

Until my last day at the office, I had managed to suppress a lot of my concern over the job market simply by going to work every day. But once the crutch was taken away all my fears surfaced at once. I couldn’t hide from reality any longer, I was frankly scared. For the past month, every day after work I applied for jobs. Sometimes I applied online, but I also spent a lot of time networking – that is, telling everyone I knew my job was about to come to an end and I needed a new one. People commiserated, but nobody had any pointers that were useful. Somehow, I needed to beat the odds and get a job, and ideally pretty soon.

By the time I got home, I had a cold boulder in the pit of my stomach. I think the same boulder was sitting in H’s stomach too. We had an argument over something trivial. Neither of us was able to stop, even when Jeremy got very distressed and started wailing.

The next morning, I drove back to M & O and walked into the building, but this time I was really, definitely, truly not an employee any more. For one thing, my badge didn’t work.

Reception called Gordo. Gordo made me wait forty-five minutes before he came down to see me. He escorted me to one of the small meeting rooms on the first floor. The conference rooms were actually outside the company’s security perimeter – a badge wasn’t needed to get to them. I had never given it any thought, but at that moment I understood this probably was Security 101 – keep potentially disgruntled employees, or rather, potentially disgruntled former employees outside.

Gordo looked like he had put on fifty pounds in the last few months. He was huffing and puffing and I was frankly surprised he made it the hundred feet from reception.

Once in the meeting room, Gordo offered me coffee and donuts. I turned down both. Gordo took a coffee and two donuts. One of the donuts was glazed, the other was covered with chocolate and sprinkles. Once we sat down, he asked for my badge and I handed it over.

In turn Gordo handed me a packet of materials, including phone numbers for HR and the company that would handle my extrication from M & O’s systems: TR2 Nexis. TR2 Nexis was my point of contact for getting on COBRA and transferring my 401-K into an IRA.

Next he handed me the severance agreement. The key number – the amount they were going to pay me, provided I agreed to sign it – was sitting near the top of the front page. It was twenty percent higher than I expected. I decided to keep my mouth shut for the moment and see where this meeting was going.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Gordo said, “You and I are going to read this contract together. Then you have 90 days to sign it if you’d like. If you do sign it, you have five days from that point to revoke your signature.”

He peered at me over his reading glasses.

“And if I don’t sign it, I don’t get the payment?” I asked.

“Correct-o,” Gordo said with relish, speaking through a bite of the chocolate donut.

We went through the document together. All along, I was trying to figure out where the extra 20% came from. And then we got to a paragraph on vacation pay. By agreeing to the severance, Gordo read off, I was forfeiting pay for unused vacation time.

Gordo looked at me, questioning. We both knew he had told me I was going to get paid for unused vacation time. We both also knew I had no bargaining position. I couldn’t prove what I had been told, and since I had already left the company I had no leverage at all. I was a supplicant in a “take it or leave it” situation.

And yet, the number, the number was 20% higher than I expected. The lack of vacation should have cut the number I expected by forty percent, not increased it by 20%. I racked my brain trying to figure out what was going on, all the while maintaining a poker face in front of Gordo.

Gordo, surprised by the lack of protest, kept reading legal mumbo jumbo. My mind raced every which way, and finally I had it. Yes, M & O was reneging on the vacation pay. That meant instead of paying me for ten weeks, they were paying me for six. But they weren’t paying me for six weeks as they intended. Instead someone – probably Gordo – had made a mistake. Rather than calculating out the payment owed for six weeks, the company had totaled up the amount I was normally paid during six bi-weekly pay periods.

I was careful not to let the warm glow I felt inside show. It was like having the nut flush and an unsuspecting fish about to bite. I waited for Gordo to finish reading the document. Then I skimmed through it a second time. It said nothing about how the payment was calculated.

Gordo asked if I had any questions. I said I had none. He told me I could take the document home and study it and that I should call him if and when I was ready to sign.

“That won’t be necessary,” I told him, “I am ready to sign now.”

Gordo was shocked. Here I was finding out the company was screwing me, and yet I seemed happy to go along with it. His mouth hung open for a few seconds. I couldn’t help myself – I looked inside. Chunks of the two donuts comingled, making their own kind of peace together before inevitably heading down his massive gullet.

Gordo composed himself and handed me a pen. I signed both copies of the agreement and handed Gordo back the pen. Then he signed both copies too. He handed one copy of the agreement to me and then put the other in his briefcase. Then he rummaged around in his briefcase until he found an envelope with my name neatly printed on it. He handed the envelope over, wordlessly. My check was inside.

Since it was standard protocol, Gordo extended his hand. It was an awkward moment. After that, Gordo escorted me to the lobby. In the lobby, I ran into Barney Talbot. Talbot blinked twice, then he shook my hand and wished me luck. After that I walked out the door.

On my way home, I stopped at the bank and deposited the check Gordo had given me.